GoPro Inc. has come out with a very dismal sales in the fourth quarter. A poor holiday season only added to their woes and a likelihood of the sale of the company does not seem far fetched.
The company has ended it’s Karma done line due to it’s poor sales response. They have cut 20% of their workforce down. The action camera maker has hired the company JPMorgan to advice them regarding their financial steps. The company had months of struggle to diversify their revenue and increase the sales of the existing amount. The sales reportedly lowered significantly for the fourth quarter earnings after it’s Hero line of cameras failed to live up the expectation during the Christmas sales.
The revenue for GoPro was reportedly $334.8 million in the fourth quarter revenue. The shares fell 3.3 percent to $5.32 in the trading. “It appears that camera launches have failed to consistently induce existing customers to replace, or to bring in new customers in the face of a variety of competing products, namely from high-priced and high-powered smart phones,” Alicia Reese, analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc.
“The data is clear that our customers demand a couple of things from us every fourth quarter if we hope to sell them a new GoPro,” GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said. “They obviously demand that we introduce a compelling new model. And they demanded that we offer them last year’s model at a reduced price. And we failed on that second part. Hero 6 we nailed. Fusion we nailed. But selling Hero 5 Black and Hero 5 Session at the same price that we offered them a year earlier caused a problem.”
The company finds the decision of taking advisers for financial plan as a wise step. “A competitor would help us understand the dynamics of our market, our business, pricing sensitivity. The challenge has been, frankly, that in many cases the only data we had access to was our own. So that’s why some of these pricing challenges that may seem obvious really were not obvious.” Woodman said.